ViaSat Reviews

Pros

The culture and environment at ViaSat are geared towards making the employee happy and willing to excel with new opportunities and positions. They are willing to move people from one position to another if they think that the new position will be a good fit.

Cons

Sometimes the management does not see the individual work being done and can overlook competent people. There is a culture of long hours on many projects and a common 'work more to finish it on time' attitude. This can burn people out.

Advice to Senior Management

Watch out for the people on the projects that are running late or in trouble as those are the employees who are most likely to run away when the system starts to grind on them. These can be some of the best and brightest.

Pros

The company does not layoff its engineers often, and offers many positions with low levels of responsibility for those looking to coast. The fear of layoffs within the company is often out of proportion.

The 401K matches up to 10%, and annual salary raises are provided between 5% and 10%.

A free gym membership is offered to the gym next door.

The location in Carlsbad, CA is a 10 minute drive to the beach and offers all the fringe benefits of Southern California weather.

Cons

For an RF engineer, Viasat offers little skill development and technical growth in the field. The work consists of chain analysis via excel spreadsheets, PWA layout, RF testing, and working with production. The RF testing is the largest portion, with the majority of the time spent in a lab doing RF Tech level testing (eg measuring RF parameters across multiple samples using spectrum analyzers, network analyzers, etc). For a design engineer, this work isn't appropriate and doesn't develop skills in creativity and analysis inherent in RF design.

There is almost no work with critical RF simulation tools such as ADS, Momentum, HFSS, etc:

Ansoft Designer is used for lumped filter analysis, however this work doesn't develop any useful simulation skills. Simulation is never taken seriously because none of the models are accurate.

Skills in design aren't developed among its junior RF engineers:

The framework consists of a handful of senior RF engineers (+10 years) who primarily do a design such as a transceiver chain using excel, then pass the PWAs for testing to the junior engineers. The junior engineers then debug issues (usually involving a schematic error) and make measurements across multiple samples to support the design. The designs use off the shelf components for 1 - 2 GHz transceivers , with the analysis and component selection typically rehashed.

Management has serious flaws at ViaSat:

The managers are picked by seniority over ability to manage the project and its engineers. This results in managers who do not handle the project and its engineers with dexterity, but rather go to war with forcing them to meet unrealistic deadlines. ViaSat wins its contracts by underbidding the competition with an unrealistic schedule, then puts aggressive managers who can push the RF engineers to work long hours. On a prototype project, expect to work 12 hour days taking measurements over several months.

I'll close with an RF engineer I worked with recently. In order to meet the project deadlines, he would leave work before his kids woke up, and arrive after they'd gone to bed. He consistently worked 12 hour days in the lab doing testing and tuning, developing no new skills but rather working to keep his job. This is not atypical at Viasat. If you plan to interview here, dig deep with questions to the lower level RF engineers to find out the full story.

Advice to Senior Management

Work on getting the junior RF engineers into design as soon as possible. Have a planned trajectory for their skill development with scheduled benchmarks. Work on sharing information between projects and departments, to improve the IP at ViaSat, while providing an educational resource to the engineers for continued growth. Remove the managers who operate by force and work on scheduling directly with the engineers. Treat your engineers as a respectful resource rather than a labor tool.

Pros

Good campus, benefits, flexibility with schedule, casual dress.

Cons

Poor review processing, raises and promotions are based more on popularity and who you know than merit, there are too many supervisors and middle managers, too few people who do the actual work.

Advice to Senior Management

Management is out of touch with the worker bees and seem to have an elitist view that worker bees are not valuable.

Pros

The flat hierarchy is good at minimizing politics. The company is also very engineering oriented which is nice coming from companies where Sales drove all.

Cons

The lack of an org chart can make it confusing on where issues should be escalated.

Advice to Senior Management

It would be helpful if the management was clearer about the management structure and had more frequent company updates to keep the employees informed.

Pros

Great benefits, flexible work hours, casual workplace. Decent resources to get job done. Pay can be competitive, but not overly generous.

Cons

I think there are a lot of good people who work at ViaSat, but the management can be a little too inwardly focused and poorly trained in people skills. Tough internal politics in several of the divisions.

Advice to Senior Management

Look to acquire better leadership at some of your divisions. Technical leaders don't always make good leaders, and just because they are very intelligent doesn't always equate to the best fit for management roles.

Pros

Great team-oriented atmosphere and non-stress culture. Engineers can thrive and find rewarding and challenging projects. "Flat" organization is good for the worker bees, though as ViaSat grows, so too does bureaucracy. I found pay and benefits to be above average. Great environment for a self-starter. Kind of regret leaving.

Cons

"Flat" organization has it's downside for those who prefer clearly delineated roles, objectives and coordinated effort. The small company approach to innovative engineering may be a necessary casualty as ViaSat grows. It's either a pro or a con depending on perspective.

Advice to Senior Management

The shareholder has become king, but don't forget to listen to and communicate with the workforce.

Pros

Good Benefits
Good Salary
Great work environment in Carlsbad CA

Cons

Very little growth opportunities if you are not a US Citizen
Not happy with Mid level managers
Low profitability in most product lines
Low business acumen in mid level management

Advice to Senior Management

Get an MBA to get good business insights.

Pros

A good environment to work in with reasonable work load. People around and higher up in level are very considerate about your issues and way to resolve them.

Cons

The management needs to buckle up and try newer areas. The kind of projects are monotonous.

Advice to Senior Management

The management needs to buckle up and try newer areas. The kind of projects are monotonous.

Pros

Good benefits including fitness club free membership.
Nice location in Carlsbad, CA
Opportunity to work on different and interesting projects.
Qualified and professional people.

Cons

Very fragmented company with poor communication betwen management and employees.
Very poor business model, based mostly on goverment contracts.
Frequent overtime work is expected and requested.
Constantly beeing reminded of the layoff possibilty and salary.
Constantly beeing reminded of "lack of work" scenario.
Management does not encourage innovation and "out-of-box" thinking.
Horrible performance review model based on 360 peers reviews and opinions rather than goals and achivements.
Not a cutting edge technology type of company.
Not a career growth company, but rather a jumpboard.

Advice to Senior Management

Change your business and your management model.
Try to diversify your customer and contracts base.
Once the government contracts dry out you are doomed.
Try to change your corporate culture, improve internal communication and make your engineers happy.
Once the economy will pick up, a lot of them will jump ship.
Introduce and encourage in-house projects to improve your development methodologies and flow.
Be more competitive, introduce more inovation and lean toward cutting edge technologies.

Pros

Smart engineers, good people.
Decent benefits.
Carlsbad, CA is a nice place.
Opportunity to work on a variety of areas.
Decent work/life balance.

Cons

People get randomly fired all the time.
Horrible business model where we provide contract based design services to other customers.
Too much dependence on government contracts.
Not very innovative and cutting edge.
Low risk, low growth company.
Benefits are reducing every year.
Employees are not kept well informed.
Fragmented company with no clear vision.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop trying to make money for yourself.
Try to keep your engineers happy instead of focussing only on shareholder profits.
If you don't innovate and depend only on government project that use outdate technology, you are doomed.